


Survival [Methods]

by ZedElla (Leviarty)



Series: Survival + Snippets [6]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-12
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 08:43:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4558137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leviarty/pseuds/ZedElla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don't eat the blueberries</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survival [Methods]

**Author's Note:**

> So this is marked as part of two seemingly unrelated series. Yup. They are unrelated, and until I started writing this piece, I had no intention of them ever being related. But then this happened and it fit so well with each of them, that here we are.
> 
> I'm certain that this story can be read without any prior knowledge of either series, though I make no guarantees.

He’d never been particularly into botany. Not that there was anything wrong with it, just he always felt it was a little silly, the study of plants. Plants were everywhere. They were usually green, sometimes purple, sometimes other colors, but mostly green. Sometimes they had flowers, sometimes they had fruits, sometimes neither. But on every planet he’d been to, plants looked pretty much the same.

That didn’t mean he doesn’t pluck the prettiest ones from the dirt on the way back to Atlantis, carefully tuck them into a bag in his vest.

“Is that wise, sir?” Grober asked.

“Botany can determine if it’s potentially dangerous,” Lorne said.

“I think he’s concerned that you might be bringing narcotics back to Atlantis,” Rosk said with a wry grin.

Lorne scowled. “And who exactly have you boys been talking to?” His team had been there for years, but they hadn’t been around for the Pot-plant fiasco of ’05.

“Lt. Cadman may have mentioned something.”

Of course she had. Because the only person who’d laughed harder at his first big mistake than Sheppard, was Laura. Of course, she’d be high as a kite at the time (they all had), and stuffing her face with a bag of Doritos, but she’d been rolling with laugher the whole damn time. So of course she would tell the marines all about it. “I’m gonna have a talk with her about appropriate storytelling.” It was a joke, mostly, because he didn’t particularly care who knew, though maybe telling everyone about that time he got the whole base high was not the best way to earn respect.

 

The botany lab was empty by the time he changed out of his BDUs and gone for his post mission physical, but then, that wasn’t wholly unexpected. They’d been spending more and more time in the greenhouse, tending to the plants that actually produced food, focusing less on the ones that just looked nice.

He found an empty pot and carefully deposited the soil and roots into it, then scrawled the designation of the planet on a piece of scrap paper.

 

The greenhouse was located in a secondary tower in sector three. It was a massive room, four stories high, with nearly every possible surface lined with plants and irrigation. Despite the fact that he didn’t love botany, he did love the way this room smelled.

Finding anyone in there was a bit like finding his way through a hay bale maze, with vines and bushes growing so high he couldn’t see over them. He wandered through, taking note of some of the unfamiliar vegetables – hundreds of DNA profiles had been in the Nemora database, but they were taking their time rotating through them. Last month there had been something like a purple pepper, and it had been the hottest thing he’d ever experienced. This month, there was a blue pepper, and he found himself hoping that it tasted a bit more like a pepper and less like someone had lit a match in his mouth.

He located Parrish in an aisle of berries.

“Hey.”

“Hello,” he replied, looking up from the basket of freshly picked fruit. “How was your mission?”

He shrugged. “Pretty uneventful. Medieval society, doesn’t use the gate much, uninterested in trade. I brought you back some flowers, left them in your office.”

“Thank you, Major,” he said with a smile. “I’ll check on them this evening.”

“What are you working on?”

“Chef Eggerton requested some berries for breakfast tomorrow. Care to help?”

“Sure,” Lorne said, sitting down on the bench. “Hey, blueberries, my favorite.” He picked a few from the basket.

“Oh, Major, don’t-”

But it was too late, he’d already bit down.

Parrish stifled a laugh as Lorne grimaced. “Not blueberries,” he said, his eyes watering.

“Yes, well, Dr. Kole mentioned that they tasted more like a very sour grapefruit. Which I might have told you if you had any patience.”

“Oh my god,” he said, struggled to gulp them down.

Parrish laughed again, but handed him a small, greenish kumquat. “Here, this one is sweet.”

Lorne carefully bit into it, letting its sweet juice comfort his screaming tastebuds.

“What is it with the Ancients and their extreme produce?” he asked after a moment.

Parrish shrugged. “Perhaps their time in space was boring, so they liked to add some spice to their meals.”

“Well, my day job is plenty dangerous. I don’t think we need our mouths under assault when we’re at home.”

“Then don’t eat the blueberries.”

They sat in relative silence, picking fruit, for a while.

“They’re screening Captain America tonight,” Parrish said. “Would you care to accompany me?”

“Sure. Hey, do you think Captain America survived the apocalypse?” Only after he’d asked it did he wonder if it was too early to make almost-jokes about the end of the world.

“I like to think so,” Parrish said. “Though I’m sure he’s too busy to continue making movies.”

“That’s a shame.” He wondered how long it would be before society resumed making movies for entertainment. Perhaps the other colonies already were, but Atlantis had plenty of excitement to keep the busy.

And speaking of excitement.

“ _All senior staff, please report to the control room._ ”

“Duty calls,” he said, sliding to his feet. He gave Parrish a quick kiss. “See you tonight.”

 

Of course, he didn’t return until much later than expected, because they’ve only narrowly avoided disaster. Again.

By the time he was back on Atlantis, it was well past midnight AST, and he was _exhausted_. He sat through yet another check up, with his eyes mostly closed the whole time, and was grateful to the nurses, who were saints for not commenting on just how terrible he knew he smelled.

“Aye, you’re all done here,” Beckett said. “Off you go, get some sleep.”

And really that was all he wanted to do.

The journey to his quarters felt outrageously long, though he knew it was only about 8 minutes total, from the infirmary to the transporter to his room.

He kicked his boots off by the door, then checked in on the boys – his sisters kids – both fast asleep in their rooms. Sometimes he felt guilty, continuing to go on life-threatening missions when they’d already lost so much, but he couldn’t see an alternative. Sheppard would, of course, approve his request to take a desk job, or more routine missions, but that wasn’t what he wanted. What would he do in a desk all day?

In his own room, he was unsurprised to find Parrish curled up in his bed. Lorne smiled, and quietly retrieved a fresh shirt and boxers.

Finally stepping into the shower felt incredible, washing off all the dirt and grime he’d accumulated behind his ears and in his hair and in the crook of his elbows. He let warm water rush over his head, and felt a pang as he shut the water off all too soon. He could stand there forever, he thought, but he was tired, and falling asleep in the shower never felt as good as it should.

He toweled dry, pulled on his clothes, and padded back to his room quietly. He crawled under the blankets as carefully as he could, but Parrish stirred.

“Shh,” Evan said, trying to ease him back to sleep before he could really wake.

“You’re back,” David mumbled as Evan draped an arm over his hips.

“Yeah. Go back to sleep.”

“Everything okay?”

“Just a minor emergency on New Athos, nothing to worry about. Sorry I missed the movie.”

“’Sokay; I took the boys.”

Evan had figured as much. “I appreciate you taking care of them when I’m not around,” he said, kissing David’s neck. He closed his eyes, resting his forehead against David’s back.

“I should head back to my quarters,” David said after a few moments.

Evan tightened his arm around him, locking him in place. “Or you could stay.”

David didn’t put up any argument. “Okay,” he said, settling back into the bed.

“Your quarters are awfully far,” Evan said, feeling himself drifting. His quarters really weren’t that far – nothing on Atlantis was, unless the transporters went down. “Maybe you could just stay here always.”

“Oh?”

“Mmhmm. We’ve got space.”

“Are you coherent enough to know what you’re suggesting?”

“Probably not. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

 

David was long gone by the time morning rolled around for Evan, and so were the kids. He found a note on the coffee table.

_We thought we’d let you sleep in. Took Dev and Alex to breakfast before class. – D.P._

Evan smiled as he walked back to his room. He regretted that he couldn’t provide 100% stability for Devon and Alex, but he was glad they got it somewhere.

 

Breakfast was still going on when he got to the mess hall, and he was pleased to find that the menu looked a little different. There were eggs (from a bird native to several planets in Pegasus, but they never tasted quite like chicken eggs), and bacon (from a plant), and tator tots (from an orange-ish tuber that wasn’t quite a potato) were staples, there every morning, but pancakes and waffles were not. And there was the fruit the botanists had been harvesting yesterday, some of it fresh, some in compote.

He piled a plate with tator tots and bacon-plant and a couple waffles, which he topped with the strawberry-like fruit, while he bypassed the evil blueberries (they bore a sign labeled “NOT blueberries”, where the ‘not’ was very bold and underlined several times).

He found Parrish still sitting near the window, but his plate is empty (save a few evil blueberries, which he clearly had no intention of eating), and the kids were gone.

“Morning,” he said, sitting down across from him.

“Good morning, Major,” he replied, then turned his attention back to the tablet he was working from. “So that thing you mentioned last night…”

Evan smiled. “Still on the table,” he said. “If you want.”

“I do.”

“Good.”

David reached across the table and nabbed a tator tot.

**Author's Note:**

> A while after writing this, I realized that the implications are that Lorne/Parrish had like 5+ years of courtship, which is pretty ridiculous. So lets just say they were pretty much living together, but kept separate quarters at first b/c of the issues with DADT, then with the kids moving in it made things potentially weird, so they continued to kind of live together but not officially, and retained the constant "I should go home" routine. This is just making it official.


End file.
